Two Wealthy Leftists Go to a Ritzy Hotel Serving $16 Cocktails to Discuss Income Inequality...

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Matt Yglesias, the wellborn son of a professor who recently bought a $1.4 million condo, sat down with Thomas Piketty, to discuss income inequality over some very expensive drinks.

The Free Beacon has staged a dramatic recreation of the meeting.

Meanwhile, incredibly, MSNBC now informs its brain-dead audience that Animal Farm is a pro-socialist tract about income inequality.

Matthew Yglesias informs us that Thomas Pinketty is not a Marxist, but rather is a fan of capitalism:

Thomas Piketty is not the anti-capitalist radical that his critics fear.

"The market economy," he tells me at the bar of the St Regis Hotel in downtown Washington, DC, "is a system that has a lot of merit." (The location was chosen by the publicist for the English edition of his book; she admitted to me that perhaps it was a little too "top one percent," but it fit everyone's schedule nicely.)

Maybe just a little "top one percent." But both of you guys are, aren't you?

But to my main point--

Not a radical? Not anti-capitalist?

Oh?

In 2002, Thomas Piketty supported and advised Ségolène Royal, a Socialist candidate for French President. And when I say "Socialist," note the capital S-- she's a member of the Parti Socialiste, and for some time its leader.

She's officially a Socialist. Or, as the Washington Post would call her, "technically" a Socialist.

In 2007, Thomas Piketty wrote an editorial urging the election of François Hollande, Royale's then boyfriend and still babydaddy (it's France, it's complicated; she's like two mistresses ago).

Hollande is a lifelong Socialist and current leader of the Parti Socialiste.

Or, again, as the Washington Post actually put it two weeks ago, he's "technically" a socialist.

The Parti Socialiste routinely forms governments with the Communist Party, and runs on the same ticket (in run-off elections) as the Communist Party, so that their candidates do not sap each votes from each other.

Perhaps I should say the French Communist Party is "technically" a Communist party.

Thomas Piketty's parents worked for a hard-left weekly newspaper* called Lutte ouvrière (which means something like "Workers' Struggle"), which is the house organ of the Communist Union (Trotskyite) [and that by the way is how it refers to itself, with that (Trotskyite) self-descriptor right there in the title], which is one of the principle groups of the Internationalist Communist Union. Even the French refer to this as "l'extreme gauche."

The Washington Post would call the "Communist Union (Trotskyite)" "technically" Trotskyite, technically communist, and technically a union.

Matt Yglesias calls it "a fan of capitalism and free markets."

This is what Matt Yglesias calls "Voxsplaining the News."

See, the left has a problem here. For about 50 years, since they stopped being "Sociailst" and Wobblies and became instead "Roosevelt Democrats," they have sworn up and down on a stack of Das Kapitals that they weren't socialists.

But they're not getting fully engorged and throbby about a book which is titled to deliberately reference Marx's famous text ("Capital" vs. "Capital in the 21st Century") who is an open official not-namecalling-here-it's-what-the-party-is-called Socialist in a socialist country.

How to square that circle?

Simple, just claim he's not a socialist, even though, like, he's more than a "socialist," he's an actual Socialiste.

Just lie, lie, lie. Like they've been doing since the Communist and Socialist parties merged with the Democrat Party 50 years ago.

* If I'm reading this right, they then went on to study... goats.

Or, creatures which are technically goats.

posted by Ace at 05:00 PM

| Access Comments